Two women hang selves

- Suicide count touches 55 this year

OUR CORRESPONDENT

The residential quarters at Agrico where Kalyani Jangel committed suicide on Tuesday. Picture by Animesh Sengupta

Two women, including one who got married just a year ago, chose to kill themselves by hanging at their respective homes in Jamshedpur in the small hours of Tuesday, pushing the suicide toll to an alarming 55 this year.

While there was no apparent reason behind the drastic step taken by 43-year-old Kalyani Jangel, a mother of two and resident of Agrico in Sidhgora police station area, Seema Sharma (20), who stayed at Rahargora in Parsudih, was mentally ill and might have killed herself out of depression.

In the first case, Kalyani, wife of Tata Steel employee Lalit Kumar Jangel, was found hanging from an iron beam at their residential quarters on Road No. 13 in Agrico.

According to relatives, all was well between the couple and they had even gone out for a stroll after dinner on Monday. “As Lalit had night duty, he left home for work around 9.45pm. Kalyani was alone. Her son is away at Pune where he is studying engineering, while her eight-year-old daughter had gone to her grandmother’s place in Bagbera. When Lalit returned around 6.15am on Tuesday and knocked on the door, there was no response from inside,” said a relative, Suryakant Prasad.

Thinking that Kalyani might have gone to the bathroom, Lalit, who knew that the key was usually kept near a window, picked it up and unlocked the door. But shock greeted him. He saw his wife hanging in front of the storeroom as soon as he stepped in.

“Kalyani had used one of her saris to hang herself,” Prasad added.

The deceased has not left behind any suicide note.

Speaking to The Telegraph, Lalit said he didn’t know why his wife committed suicide. “Everything was normal. There was no differences between us,” he claimed.

Officer-in-charge of Sidhgora police station Sambhu Prasad Gupta was as clueless.

“It appears to be a case of suicide. Something must have prompted her to take the extreme step,” Gupta said.

The body has been sent to MGM Medical College’s mortuary for post-mortem.

Seema Devi also chose to hang herself from the ceiling fan at her in-laws’ house in Rahargora. Husband Rajendra Sharma, who works at a private company in Govindpur, said she had been suffering from mental ailment for some time now and was undergoing treatment.

“Last night (Monday), my mother and I took her to a nursing home. She became normal after a while and we brought her back around midnight after which I went to sleep. I woke up in the morning to find her hanging from the ceiling,” Sharma said, adding they had married a year ago.